Abraham Harold Maslow was born April 1, 1908 in Brooklyn, New
York.
He was the first of seven children born to his parents, who
themselves
were uneducated Jewish immigrants from Russia. His parents,
hoping
for the best for their children in the new world, pushed him hard
for
academic
success. Not surprisingly, he became very lonely as a boy,
and
found
his refuge in books.

To satisfy his parents, he first studied law at the City College
of
New York (CCNY). After three semesters, he transferred to
Cornell,
and then back to CCNY. He married Bertha Goodman, his first
cousin,
against his parents wishes. Abe and Bertha went on to have
two
daughters.

He and Bertha moved to Wisconsin so that he could attend the
University
of Wisconsin. Here, he became interested in psychology, and
his
school
work began to improve dramatically. He spent time
there working with Harry Harlow, who is famous for his experiments
with
baby rhesus monkeys and attachment behavior.

He received his BA in 1930, his MA in 1931, and his PhD in 1934,
all
in psychology, all from the University of Wisconsin. A year
after
graduation, he returned to New York to work with E. L. Thorndike
at
Columbia,
where Maslow became interested in research on human sexuality.

He began teaching full time at Brooklyn College. During
this
period
of his life, he came into contact with the many European
intellectuals
that were immigrating to the US, and Brooklyn in particular, at
that
time
-- people like Adler, Fromm, Horney, as well as several Gestalt
and
Freudian
psychologists.

Maslow served as the chair of the psychology department at
Brandeis from 1951 to 1969. While there he met Kurt
Goldstein,
who had originated the idea of self-actualization in his famous
book, The
Organism
(1934).
It was also here that he began his crusade for a humanistic
psychology
-- something ultimately much more important to him than his own
theorizing.

He spend his final years in semi-retirement in California, until,
on
June 8 1970, he died of a heart attack after years of ill health.

Theory

One of the many interesting things Maslow noticed while he worked
with
monkeys early in his career, was that some needs take precedence
over
others.
For example, if you are hungry and thirsty, you will tend to try
to
take
care of the thirst first. After all, you can do without food
for
weeks, but you can only do without water for a couple of
days!
Thirst
is a “stronger” need than hunger. Likewise, if you are very
very
thirsty, but someone has put a choke hold on you and you can’t
breath,
which is more important? The need to breathe, of
course. On
the other hand, sex is less powerful than any of these.
Let’s
face
it, you won’t die if you don’t get it!

Maslow took this idea and created his now famous hierarchy of
needs.
Beyond the details of air, water, food, and sex, he laid out five
broader
layers: the physiological needs, the needs for safety and
security,
the needs for love and belonging, the needs for esteem, and the
need to
actualize the self, in that order.

1. The physiological needs. These include the
needs
we have for oxygen, water, protein, salt, sugar, calcium, and
other
minerals
and vitamins. They also include the need to maintain a pH
balance
(getting too acidic or base will kill you) and temperature (98.6
or
near
to it). Also, there’s the needs to be active, to rest, to
sleep,
to get rid of wastes (CO2, sweat, urine, and feces), to
avoid
pain,
and to have sex. Quite a collection!

Maslow believed, and research supports him, that these are in
fact
individual
needs, and that a lack of, say, vitamin C, will lead to a very
specific
hunger for things which have in the past provided that vitamin C
--
e.g.
orange juice. I guess the cravings that some pregnant women
have,
and the way in which babies eat the most foul tasting baby food,
support
the idea anecdotally.

2. The safety and security needs. When the
physiological
needs are largely taken care of, this second layer of needs comes
into
play. You will become increasingly interested in finding
safe
circumstances,
stability, protection. You might develop a need for
structure,
for
order, some limits.

Looking at it negatively, you become concerned, not with needs
like
hunger and thirst, but with your fears and anxieties. In the
ordinary
American adult, this set of needs manifest themselves in the form
of
our
urges to have a home in a safe neighborhood, a little job security
and
a nest egg, a good retirement plan and a bit of insurance, and so
on.

3. The love and belonging needs. When
physiological
needs and safety needs are, by and large, taken care of, a third
layer
starts to show up. You begin to feel the need for friends, a
sweetheart,
children, affectionate relationships in general, even a sense of
community.
Looked at negatively, you become increasing susceptible to
loneliness
and
social anxieties.

In our day-to-day life, we exhibit these needs in our desires to
marry,
have a family, be a part of a community, a member of a church, a
brother
in the fraternity, a part of a gang or a bowling club. It is
also
a part of what we look for in a career.

4. The esteem needs. Next, we begin to look
for
a
little self-esteem. Maslow noted two versions of esteem
needs, a
lower one and a higher one. The lower one is the need for
the
respect
of others, the need for status, fame, glory, recognition,
attention,
reputation,
appreciation, dignity, even dominance. The higher form
involves
the
need for self-respect, including such feelings as confidence,
competence,
achievement, mastery, independence, and freedom. Note that
this
is
the “higher” form because, unlike the respect of others, once you
have
self-respect, it’s a lot harder to lose!

The negative version of these needs is low self-esteem and
inferiority
complexes. Maslow felt that Adler was really onto something
when
he proposed that these were at the roots of many, if not most, of
our
psychological
problems. In modern countries, most of us have what we need
in
regard
to our physiological and safety needs. We, more often than
not,
have
quite a bit of love and belonging, too. It’s a little
respect
that
often seems so very hard to get!

All of the preceding four levels he calls deficit needs,
or D-needs.
If
you
don’t have enough of something -- i.e. you have a deficit -- you
feel the need. But if you get all you need, you feel nothing
at
all!
In other words, they cease to be motivating. As the old
blues
song
goes, “you don’t miss your water till your well runs dry!”

He also talks about these levels in terms of homeostasis.
Homeostasis
is
the
principle by which your furnace thermostat
operates:
When it gets too cold, it switches the heat on; When it gets
too
hot, it switches the heat off. In the same way, your body,
when
it
lacks a certain substance, develops a hunger for it; When it
gets
enough of it, then the hunger stops. Maslow simply extends
the
homeostatic
principle to needs, such as safety, belonging, and esteem, that we
don’t
ordinarily think of in these terms.

Maslow sees all these needs as essentially survival needs.
Even
love and esteem are needed for the maintenance of health. He
says
we all have these needs built in to us genetically, like
instincts.
In fact, he calls them instinctoid -- instinct-like --
needs.

In terms of overall development, we move through these levels a
bit
like stages. As newborns, our focus (if not our entire set
of
needs)
is on the physiological. Soon, we begin to recognize that we
need
to be safe. Soon after that, we crave attention and
affection.
A bit later, we look for self-esteem. Mind you, this is in
the
first
couple of years!

Under stressful conditions, or when survival is threatened, we
can
“regress”
to a lower need level. When you great career falls flat, you
might
seek out a little attention. When your family ups and leaves
you,
it seems that love is again all you ever wanted. When you
face
chapter
eleven after a long and happy life, you suddenly can’t think of
anything
except money.

These things can occur on a society-wide basis as well:
When
society
suddenly flounders, people start clamoring for a strong leader to
take
over and make things right. When the bombs start falling,
they
look
for safety. When the food stops coming into the stores,
their
needs
become even more basic.

Maslow suggested that we can ask people for their “philosophy
of
the future” -- what would their ideal life or world be like
-- and
get significant information as to what needs they do or do not
have
covered.

If you have significant problems along your development -- a
period
of extreme insecurity or hunger as a child, or the loss of a
family
member
through death or divorce, or significant neglect or abuse -- you
may
“fixate”
on that set of needs for the rest of your life.

This is Maslow’s understanding of neurosis. Perhaps you
went
through
a war as a kid. Now you have everything your heart needs -- yet
you
still
find yourself obsessing over having enough money and keeping the
pantry
well-stocked. Or perhaps your parents divorced when you were
young.
Now you have a wonderful spouse -- yet you get insanely jealous or
worry
constantly that they are going to leave you because you are not
“good
enough”
for them. You get the picture.

Self-actualization

The last level is a bit different. Maslow has used a
variety
of
terms to refer to this level: He has called it growth
motivation
(in contrast to deficit motivation), being needs (or B-needs,
in
contrast
to D-needs), and self-actualization.

These are needs that do not involve balance or homeostasis.
Once
engaged, they continue to be felt. In fact, they are likely
to
become
stronger as we “feed” them! They involve the continuous
desire to
fulfill potentials, to “be all that you can be.” They are a
matter
of becoming the most complete, the fullest, “you” -- hence the
term,
self-actualization.

Now, in keeping with his theory up to this point, if you want to
be
truly self-actualizing, you need to have your lower needs taken
care
of,
at least to a considerable extent. This makes sense:
If you
are hungry, you are scrambling to get food; If you are
unsafe,
you
have to be continuously on guard; If you are isolated and
unloved,
you have to satisfy that need; If you have a low sense of
self-esteem,
you have to be defensive or compensate. When lower needs are
unmet,
you can’t fully devote yourself to fulfilling your potentials.

It isn’t surprising, then, the world being as difficult as it is,
that
only a small percentage of the world’s population is truly,
predominantly,
self-actualizing. Maslow at one point suggested only about
two
percent!

The question becomes, of course, what exactly does Maslow mean by
self-actualization.
To answer that, we need to look at the kind of people he called
self-actualizers.
Fortunately, he did this for us, using a qualitative method called
biographical
analysis.

He began by picking out a group of people, some historical
figures,
some people he knew, whom he felt clearly met the standard of
self-actualization.
Included in this august group were Abraham Lincoln, Thomas
Jefferson, Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jane Adams, William
James, Albert Schweitzer, Benedict Spinoza, and Alduous Huxley,
plus 12
unnamed people who were alive at the time Maslow did his
research. He then looked at their biographies,
writings, the acts and words of those he knew personally, and so
on.
From these sources, he developed a list of qualities that seemed
characteristic
of these people, as opposed to the great mass of us.

These people were reality-centered, which means they
could
differentiate
what is fake and dishonest from what is real and genuine.
They
were
problem-centered,
meaning they treated life’s difficulties as problems demanding
solutions,
not as personal troubles to be railed at or surrendered to.
And
they
had a different perception of means and ends. They
felt
that
the ends don’t necessarily justify the means, that the means could
be
ends
themselves, and that the means -- the journey -- was often more
important
than the ends.

The self-actualizers also had a different way of relating to
others.
First, they enjoyed solitude, and were comfortable being
alone.
And they enjoyed deeper personal relations
with a few close friends and family members, rather than more
shallow
relationships
with many people.

They enjoyed autonomy, a relative independence from
physical
and social needs. And they resisted
enculturation, that is, they were not susceptible to social
pressure to be "well adjusted" or to "fit in"
-- they were, in fact, nonconformists in the best sense.

They had an unhostile sense of humor -- preferring to
joke
at
their own expense, or at the human condition, and never directing
their
humor at others. They had a quality he called acceptance
of
self
and others, by which he meant that these people would be
more
likely
to take you as you are than try to change you into what they
thought
you
should be. This same acceptance applied to their attitudes
towards
themselves: If some quality of theirs wasn’t harmful, they
let it
be, even enjoying it as a personal quirk. On the other hand,
they
were often strongly motivated to change negative qualities in
themselves that could be changed. Along with this comes spontaneity
and
simplicity: They preferred being themselves rather
than
being
pretentious or artificial. In fact, for all their
nonconformity,
he found that they tended to be conventional on the surface, just
where
less self-actualizing nonconformists tend to be the most dramatic.

Further, they had a sense of humility and respect towards
others -- something Maslow also called democratic values --
meaning
that they were open to ethnic and individual variety, even
treasuring
it.
They had a quality Maslow called human kinship or Gemeinschaftsgefühl-- social interest,
compassion, humanity. And this was accompanied by a strongethics, which was spiritual but seldom conventionally
religious
in nature.

And these people had a certain freshness of appreciation,
an
ability to see things, even ordinary things, with wonder.
Along
with
this comes their ability to be creative, inventive, and
original.
And, finally, these people tended to have more peak
experiences
than the average person. A peak experience is one that takes
you
out of yourself, that makes you feel very tiny, or very large, to
some
extent one with life or nature or God. It gives you a
feeling of
being a part of the infinite and the eternal. These
experiences
tend
to leave their mark on a person, change them for the better, and
many
people
actively seek them out. They are also called mystical
experiences,
and are an important part of many religious and philosophical
traditions.

Maslow doesn’t think that self-actualizers are perfect, of
course.
There were several flaws or imperfections he discovered
along
the way as
well: First, they often suffered considerable anxiety and
guilt
--
but realistic anxiety and guilt, rather than misplaced or neurotic
versions.
Some of them were absentminded and overly kind. And finally,
some
of them had unexpected moments of ruthlessness, surgical coldness,
and
loss of humor.

Two other points he makes about these self-actualizers:
Their
values were "natural" and seemed to flow effortlessly from their
personalities. And they appeared to transcend many of the
dichotomies others accept as being undeniable, such as the
differences
between the spiritual and the physical, the selfish and the
unselfish,
and the masculine and the feminine.

Metaneeds and metapathologies

Another way in which Maslow approach the problem of what is
self-actualization
is to talk about the special, driving needs (B-needs, of course)
of the
self-actualizers. They need the following in their lives in
order
to be happy:

Truth, rather than dishonesty.
Goodness, rather than evil.
Beauty, not ugliness or vulgarity.
Unity, wholeness, and transcendence of opposites, not
arbitrariness
or forced choices.
Aliveness, not deadness or the mechanization of life.
Uniqueness, not bland uniformity.
Perfection and necessity, not sloppiness, inconsistency, or
accident.
Completion, rather than incompleteness.
Justice and order, not injustice and lawlessness.
Simplicity, not unnecessary complexity.
Richness, not environmental impoverishment.
Effortlessness, not strain.
Playfulness, not grim, humorless, drudgery.
Self-sufficiency, not dependency.
Meaningfulness, rather than senselessness.

At first glance, you might think that everyone obviously needs
these.
But think: If you are living through an economic depression
or a
war, or are living in a ghetto or in rural poverty, do you worry
about
these issues, or do you worry about getting enough to eat and a
roof
over
your head? In fact, Maslow believes that much of the what is
wrong
with the world comes down to the fact that very few people really
are
interested
in these values -- not because they are bad people, but because
they
haven’t
even had their basic needs taken care of!

When a self-actualizer doesn’t get these needs fulfilled, they
respond
with metapathologies -- a list of problems as long as the
list
of
metaneeds! Let me summarize it by saying that, when forced
to
live
without these values, the self-actualizer develops depression,
despair,
disgust,alienation, and a degree of cynicism.

Maslow hoped that his efforts at describing the self-actualizing
person
would eventually lead to a “periodic table” of the kinds of
qualities,
problems, pathologies, and even solutions characteristic of higher
levels
of human potential. Over time, he devoted increasing
attention,
not
to his own theory, but to humanistic psychology and the human
potentials
movement.

Toward the end of his life, he inaugurated what he called the fourth
force in psychology: Freudian and other “depth”
psychologies
constituted the first force; Behaviorism was the second
force;
His own humanism, including the European existentialists, were the
third
force. The fourth force was the transpersonal
psychologies
which, taking their cue from Eastern philosophies, investigated
such
things
as meditation, higher levels of consciousness, and even
parapsychological
phenomena. Perhaps the best known transpersonalist today is
Ken
Wilber,
author of such books as The Atman Project and The
History
of
Everything.

Discussion

Maslow has been a very inspirational figure in personality
theories.
In the 1960’s in particular, people were tired of the
reductionistic,
mechanistic
messages of the behaviorists and physiological
psychologists.
They
were looking for meaning and purpose in their lives, even a
higher,
more
mystical meaning. Maslow was one of the pioneers in that
movement
to bring the human being back into psychology, and the person back
into
personality!

At approximately the same time, another movement was getting
underway,
one inspired by some of the very things that turned Maslow
off:
computers
and information processing, as well as very rationalistic theories
such
as Piaget’s cognitive development theory and Noam Chomsky’s
linguistics.
This, of course, became the cognitive movement in
psychology. As
the heyday of humanism appeared to lead to little more than drug
abuse,
astrology, and self indulgence, cognitivism provided the
scientific
ground students of psychology were yearning for.

But the message should not be lost: Psychology is, first
and
foremost,
about people, real people in real lives, and not about computer
models,
statistical analyses, rat behavior, test scores, and laboratories.

Some criticism

The “big picture” aside, there are a few criticisms we might
direct
at Maslow’s theory itself. The most common criticism
concerns his
methodology: Picking a small number of people that he
himself
declared
self-actualizing, then reading about them or talking with them,
and
coming
to conclusions about what self-actualization is in the first place
does
not sound like good science to many people.

In his defense, I should point out that he understood this, and
thought
of his work as simply pointing the way. He hoped that others
would
take up the cause and complete what he had begun in a more
rigorous
fashion.
It is a curiosity that Maslow, the “father” of American humanism,
began
his career as a behaviorist with a strong physiological
bent. He
did indeed believe in science, and often grounded his ideas in
biology.
He only meant to broaden psychology to include the best in us, as
well
as the pathological!

Another criticism, a little harder to respond to, is that Maslow
placed
such constraints on self-actualization. First, Kurt
Goldstein and
Carl Rogers used the phrase to refer to what every living creature
does:
To try to grow, to become more, to fulfill its biological
destiny.
Maslow limits it to something only two percent of the human
species
achieves.
And while Rogers felt that babies were the best examples of human
self-actualization,
Maslow saw it as something achieved only rarely by the young.

Another point is that he asks that we pretty much take care of
our
lower
needs before self-actualization comes to the forefront. And
yet
we
can find many examples of people who exhibited at very least
aspects of
self-actualization who were far from having their lower needs
taken
care
of. Many of our best artists and authors, for example,
suffered
from
poverty, bad upbringing, neuroses, and depression. Some
could
even
be called psychotic! If you think about Galileo, who prayed
for
ideas
that would sell, or Rembrandt, who could barely keep food on the
table,
or Toulouse Lautrec, whose body tormented him, or van Gogh, who,
besides
poor, wasn’t quite right in the head, if you know what I
mean...
Weren’t these people engaged in some form of
self-actualization?
The idea of artists and poets and philosophers (and
psychologists!)
being
strange is so common because it has so much truth to it!

We also have the example of a number of people who were creative
in
some fashion even while in concentration camps.
Trachtenberg, for
example, developed a new way of doing arithmetic in a camp.
Viktor
Frankl developed his approach to therapy while in a camp.
There
are
many more examples.

And there are examples of people who were creative when unknown,
became
successful only to stop being creative. Ernest Hemingway, if
I’m
not mistaken, is an example. Perhaps all these examples are
exceptions,
and the hierarchy of needs stands up well to the general
trend.
But
the exceptions certainly do put some doubt into our minds.

I would like to suggest a variation on Maslow's theory that might
help.
If we take the idea of actualization as Goldstein and Rogers use
it,
i.e.
as the "life force" that drives all creatures, we can also
acknowledge
that there are various things that interfere with the full
effectiveness
of that life force. If we are deprived of our basic physical
needs,
if we are living under threatening circumstances, if we are
isolated
from
others, or if we have no confidence in our abilities, we may
continue
to
survive, but it will not be as fulfilling a live as it could
be.
We will not be fully actualizing our potentials! We
could
even understand that there might be people that actualize despite
deprivation! If we take the deficit needs as subtracting
from
actualization,
and if we talk about
full self-actualization rather than self-actualization
as a separate category of need, Maslow's theory comes into line
with
other
theories, and the exceptional people who succeed in the face of
adversity
can be seen as heroic rather than freakish abberations.

I received the following email from Gareth Costello of Dublin,
Ireland,
which balances my somewhat negative review of Maslow:

One mild criticism I would have is of your concluding
assessment,
where you appeal for a broader view of self-actualisation that
could
include
subjects such as van Gogh and other hard-at-heel
intellectual/creative
giants. This appears to be based on a view that people like van
Gogh,
etc.
were, by virtue of their enormous creativity, 'at least partly'
self-actualised.

I favour Maslow's more narrow definition of self-actualisation
and
would
not agree that self-actualisation equates with supreme
self-expression.
I suspect that self-actualisation is, often, a demotivating
factor
where
artistic creativity is concerned, and that artists such as van
Gogh
thrived
(artistically, if not in other respects) specifically in the
absence of
circumstances conducive to self-actualisation. Even financially
successful
artists (e.g. Stravinsky, who was famously good at looking after
his
financial
affairs, as well as affairs of other kinds) do exhibit some of
the
non-self-actualised
'motivators' that you describe so well.

Self-actualisation implies an outwardness and openness that
contrasts
with the introspection that can be a pre-requisite for great
artistic
self-expression.
Where scientists can look out at the world around them to find
something
of profound or universal significance, great artists usually
look
inside
themselves to find something of personal significance - the
universality
of their work is important but secondary. It's interesting that
Maslow
seems to have concentrated on people concerned with the
big-picture
when
defining self-actualisation. In Einstein, he selected a
scientist who
was
striving for a theory of the entire physical universe. The
philosophers
and politicians he analysed were concerned with issues of great
relevance
to humanity.

This is not to belittle the value or importance of the
'small-picture'
- society needs splitters as well as lumpers. But while
self-actualisation
may be synonymous with psychological balance and health, it does
not
necessarily
lead to professional or creative brilliance in all fields. In
some
instances,
it may remove the driving force that leads people to excel --
art being
the classic example. So I don't agree that the scope of
self-actualisation
should be extended to include people who may well have been
brilliant,
but who were also quite possibly damaged, unrounded or unhappy
human
beings.

If I had the opportunity to chose between brilliance (alone) or
self-actualisation
(alone) for my children, I would go for the latter!

Gareth makes some very good points!

Bibliography

Maslow’s books are easy to read and full of interesting
ideas.
The best known are Toward a Psychology of Being
(1968), Motivation
and
Personality (first edition, 1954, and second edition,
1970),
and The Further Reaches of Human Nature
(1971).
Finally,
there are many articles by Maslow, especially in the Journal
of
Humanistic
Psychology, which he cofounded. For more
information
on-line, go to http://www.nidusnet.org.